Arrivals
by joanhello
Summary: The tiny space ships that brought to Earth the infants that would grow up to be Megamind, Minion and Metro Man were programmed, not just to go to the same planet, but the same house. What's up with that? (Main characters are Metro Man's parents and a bunch of OCs.)
1. Chapter 1

Robert Scott really hadn't known. He'd spent most of Christmas morning reading the paper while Sally opened presents, occasionally making some appropriate noises, but with very little of his attention in the room. The next thing he knew, the guests were coming in and he heard his sister give that particular squeal that was her reaction to anything extremely cute and his uncle Dennis was saying "Well, who's this little guy?" When he looked up, everyone was gathered around Sally, who was unmistakably holding a baby.

He had plenty of time to compose his face, to get rid of the look of astonishment. His experience as a manager had taught him that, when reality took a turn for the unexpected, his strategy should begin with pretending to be in control, faking it until, later, behind the scenes, he was able to actually make it. So as he listened to his wife tell the whole family that he had put the baby under the tree for her, he forced his features into a look that was mostly affectionate with just a hint of smugness, and ignored the glances he was getting from his father, the one member of the family to whom he'd confided his decision, made after the accident, after Sally had come out of brain surgery with almost but not quite all her mental abilities intact, that there wasn't going to be any baby.

She'd lost executive function. That was what the doctors called it. In plain English, the ability to set priorities on any kind of rational basis. There had been cases, they said, of people with this disability starving to death in apartments with fully-stocked kitchens, simply because the sensations of hunger seemed less important than whatever else they were currently doing. She would need someone keeping an eye on her for the rest of her life, staff who knew better than to assume she was fine just because she seemed fine. And she did seem fine. Her graciousness, thoughtfulness, good taste and intelligence, her sense of humor and self-confidence and her obvious love for him were all unchanged. It was just that she couldn't tell serious from frivolous anymore.

Her desire to be a mother was also undiminished, even though she was clearly unfit. Robert had pretended to co-operate while secretly getting a vasectomy under an assumed name at a clinic chosen for the unlikelihood that anyone they knew would ever go there. In the years since, he'd gone through the motions of fertility treatments (quietly bringing the treatment center staff in on the charade; for enough money they were willing to play along) and then adoption efforts that always fell through. He had hoped that the repeated failures would tire her out and turn her attention to something else. Now, suddenly, an infant had simply appeared, for all the world as if she'd wished the child into existence, making dust of all his best efforts.

After the guests had gone home, while Sally supervised a maid and two men of the household staff, pulled from dinner clean-up to get antique baby furniture out of the attic and set it up in what had been a guest bedroom, Robert searched the videos from the mansion's security cameras, looking for the record of the boy's entrance into the house. When he found it, he just sat there looking at the screen for a long moment.

A tiny space ship. Self-guided, displaying capabilities beyond anything known to Earth's technologies. And it had actually fended off another... object... that had also been heading for the front gate. The boy was an alien.

The next day he visited his father at Scott-Metro Technologies, the subsidiary of Scott Industries that did hush-hush work for the government. Lewis Scott was nearly eighty, but he was so shrewd and capable that the subject of his retirement never came up. In one of the soundproofed and secured meeting rooms built for the unfurling of top secret plans, Robert explained the situation, played back the video, and waited for his reaction.

"So it's true."

"What's true, Dad?"

The elder Scott rose from his chair. "First, I'm going to track down that other spacecraft, find out where it went and what was in it."

"You think it's a spacecraft?"

"You think it's anything else? Come." He led the way up two floors to the climate-controlled room at the back of the company library, where the earliest documents relating to the corporation's history were kept. After both men put on the special gloves for handling fragile antique paper, they went to the shelf that contained the works of Andrew Scott, the ancestor who had founded the company as Scott Tool and Die.

It was a sizable shelf, filled with laboratory and workshop journals, patent applications, blueprints, press releases, sketchbooks, notes and a long row of personal journals going back to Andrew's boyhood. It was one of those that Andrew's great-grandson, Lewis, pulled out, thumbed through until he found the date he wanted, and handed, open, to the next generation. "Start here," he said.

If anyone else had given him this mysterioso treatment, Robert would have said something like "Just tell me, damn it." But the old man had always intimidated him. Besides, he often turned out to have good reason for doing things the way he did. Robert sat down at a table and began to read.


	2. Chapter 2

August 12, 1899

"To astronomers, they're called meteors." Andy Scott had learned this in college. He was the first member of the family ever to go, on a scholarship, and even though his parents could have used his help on the farm, they could hardly let him pass up this opportunity. He came home in the summers, when the work was hardest, and when the opportunity presented itself, he shared little bits of his education with his family. This was one of them. They were all standing on the hillside behind the barn, looking into the night sky, watching for shooting stars. They weren't hard to find. "They're fragments of rock that orbit the Sun in space beyond Earth's atmosphere. As long as they're out there, they're invisible, but when they fall into the atmosphere, they're going so fast that they burn. The light of the burning is what we see."

"How high does the atmosphere go, Andy?" asked his sister, Bella. She was twelve, the third of the Scott children.

"That's still a matter of debate. Professor Nelson, who taught me, believes it's about seven miles high, but he admits that science doesn't know for sure. The tallest mountains in the world, in Tibet, are about six and a half miles high and they have snow all the way to their summits, so there must be atmosphere above them, or the clouds wouldn't get high enough to drop snow on them."

"It could have fallen lower and then been blown up there," said Bob, the sibling between Andy and Bella. He was fifteen and had been competing with Andy for years, trying to show him up through clever reasoning.

"If there's no atmosphere, there can't be wind, so it can't have been blown," Andy replied, responding to the challenge. Another battle of wits between the brothers might have started, but Tillie, at eight the second-littlest Scott, spoke first.

"There's a star that's getting bigger. It's in Sagittarius. Look." Of all the siblings, Tillie had taken the most interest when Andy had taught them all the constellations. Andy knew where to look in the sky. The others followed his gaze.

"Right out of the center of the Milky Way," he breathed, excited. "We could be seeing something scientifically important, right now!" They all looked in silence at the growing light. After less than a minute, it was bright enough to cast shadows. In another minute it was the brightest thing in the sky. When it was nearly as big as the full Moon, and so bright that the colors of things around them began to be visible, his mother spoke.

"Andy, could this thing be dangerous?"

"I don't think so, Ma," he replied, although he wasn't sure. "This is probably a very large meteor and it's probably going to land somewhere in the county, but I don't think we're in -" He broke off as the light became a huge fireball, bigger than the house, roaring overhead, crashing into their woodlot. Its fire scattered and spread into smaller fires on the ground and in the trees.

Andy and Bob sprinted toward it. Their mother held four-year-old Donnie back, but all the others, including their father, followed.

The woodlot was semi-swamp and this was the first clear night after two days of rain. By the time they got close enough to feel the heat, only one spot was still burning, an area about the size of their parlor. It was full of broken trees and bushes, jagged curved sheets of metal and the remains of machinery. The ground itself seemed to be burning. If Andy hadn't seen spilled fuel burn before, he wouldn't have known what it was.

At the far end of the burning area, almost in the stream, something moved that was not flame. It seemed shapeless at first, in the poor light, and then the silhouette of a hand was visible against a burning tree stump. There was somebody in there!

"Soak yourselves!" ordered their father. In this community of small farms, the neighbors were the firefighters, and Pa Scott had taught his sons, as soon as they were old enough to help, that if there was enough water nearby, they must get good and wet before running into a burning building. Obediently, Andy and Bob plunged into the stream, going completely under before rising and dashing through the circle of flames.

The person they had seen was trying to rise, failing, struggling a little forward on his knees, trying to rise again. They assumed it was "his" not "her" because the figure's clothing consisted of a perfectly round helmet and a bulky coverall. Inside the soot-smudged glass, the head looked distorted, too big on top, but it was hard to see. Andy picked the stranger up. Small and skinny, only a little bigger than Bella, he was weak and yet he struggled almost out of Andy's arms, reaching toward a globe that lay in the steaming mud a little way away. It was the same size as the helmet, and Andy was afraid that that was exactly what it was, the severed head of the other person who'd been aboard this burning flying machine. That was what it had to be, some kind of dirigible that had caught fire in flight. Andy had never seen a dirigible, but he'd read about them and he knew that, if one caught fire, everyone aboard usually died. Bob went toward the globe on the ground, almost picked it up, but when he felt the heat coming from it, he took off his dripping shirt, wrapped it around the globe (raising a cloud of steam) and used it as a sling to carry the thing without touching it. Then the stranger relaxed in Andy's arms. The two young men carried their burdens back to the stream and lowered them into waist-deep water as the rest of the family, including Ma and Donnie, gathered around.

The man (boy?) that Andy had rescued now put his hands to the front of his helmet, did something with his thumbs at the throat, and the seemingly solid glass parted in the center and slid open. A strange face was revealed, a head like an upside-down teardrop, the hairless scalp huge and the features all crowded down at the bottom. He gasped at the air with an expression of relief, then spoke a handful of incomprehensible syllables, meeting their eyes as he spoke. Andy guessed he was thanking them.

"Do you speak English?" Pa asked.

The stranger's face went blank with confusion. He tried another burst of words that meant nothing to them.

"Sprecken zie Deutsch?" German was Ma's first language, although she spoke English without an accent. Still no sign of comprehension from the stranger.

"Operor vos narro Latin?" Andy tried. Latin was the universal language of science and scholarship, so he'd had a semester of it. It got no better results than the other two. Then the globe pulled itself out of Bob's shirt and bobbed forward in the water. Now the stranger turned, smiling again. Just as with the helmet, the glass opened. Water spilled out, and a small shape, about the size of a person's head, went with it into the stream. Then it popped up and they could see that it was... a fish? But a fish unlike any they'd ever seen. It had two rows of glowing tendrils along its back and a little tangle of something that looked like wire on top of its head, it sat on top of the water, rather than in it, and its eyes met their eyes as if it were a person.

Then it spoke. Gibberish, but it undeniably spoke.

Scotts of various sizes exchanged nervous glances. The fish looked at its companion, who answered in gibberish and put an arm around it, drawing it in close to his body in a protective way.

"Well," said Ma. "This young fella and his wet friend can't talk to us, probably can't understand us, but they'll understand a meal and a bath and a warm bed, so let's see what we can do there." Pa gestured toward the house. Without a word, the fish returned to its globe, which sank to fill with water and then sealed up. The stranger picked it up and they all trooped up the hill.

The first stop was at the pump, where Bella pumped out a bucketful and Tillie fetched soap, a scrub brush and a towel. Soot takes a lot of scrubbing to get off, so Ma had time to make a quick meal. Once the globe was clean, it moved by itself, rolling along the ground, bouncing at rough spots and up the porch stairs. The coverall was revealed to be silver, and the human (or at least more or less human-looking) guest's skin, pale and colorless in the faint light of the fire and the moon, turned out to be blue when the kerosene lamplight touched it as he came into the house, the fish following in its globe like a dog heeling.

The high chair was still kept folded up behind the door even though Donnie was too big for it now. It was set up at the table. Their blue guest set the globe in it, and it changed its shape to a bucket with the fish bobbing to the surface. Over dinner, names were exchanged. The blue one was Ilu Vorn and the fish was Ilu Keo. Ilu Vorn fed Ilu Keo a bite of every food. The family taught them the words for the things around them by pointing, and also "Please pass the.." and "Thank you."

While they were eating, Uncle Jessup and Cousin Tony came in. They had seen the fireball from their house (the next farm south) and had come as soon as they could, considering that their horses were worked out. They stopped in the kitchen door, struck wordless by the sight of the Ilus as well as the barrage of description coming from the two youngest Scotts. "You wounen't believe, it was a richibul and it was on fire! It burned up in the sky! It was sooo -"

"That's enough, kids," said Pa, and explained what had happened, ending with the introduction of their two guests. Cousin Tony tried some French on them, but they didn't seem to understand it, either. The two men were invited to stay for this late dinner, but they passed, saying they had to get up early tomorrow. Really, of course, they wanted to tell the rest of the family about this amazing event. By dinner time tomorrow, the news would be all over town.

After the meal, Pa thought that Ilu Keo might like to sleep in the pond, so he led the two of them out there. Ilu Keo liked the pond, but then Ilu Vorn insisted on staying there, close to his friend, instead of coming back to the house to sleep in a bed. So the pup tent they used on hunting trips was brought down from the loft above the barn and set up there, with the canvas ground-cloth and a quickly assembled bedroll. Ilu Vorn detached his helmet, pushed it in, climbed in after it, then stuck his head out and said "Thank you," to each of them by name.

The next day's entry started with Andrew's explanation that he was not going to go back and correct all references to the Ilus as male.


	3. Chapter 3

The older Scotts hadn't expected Donnie to show up for the morning chores. The boy had been taught to milk, though his small hands weren't very fast, and he liked the animals, a sentiment which they returned, but to expect a child of four to stay away from anything as new and fascinating as the Ilus was too much to expect. Coming out to the barn, Pa and the children had seen Vorn having a swim in the pond and figured that would be the last they'd see of the boy for the next half an hour. But here he was, interrupting as Pa poured grain rations into mangers and the older kids got started milking, looking like he had something important to say.

What it turned out to be was, "Vorn's a lady."

Pa looked out a window. Ilu Vorn was done swimming and was now drying off. As he watched, their blue guest laid down the towel and began getting into the silver coverall.

"Well, I don't think it's very ladylike, her doing that in plain sight, but you're right, Donnie. Vorn is a her, not a him." All the older kids wanted to jump up and look but none did. When the animals got done eating their grain rations, they'd want to be done with being milked as well, and getting them to hold still after that would be more of a challenge than any of them wanted to deal with.

After milking, they led the livestock out to the pond to drink as usual. Vorn had already taken down the tent, rolled up the bedroll and ground-cloth, and stashed it all in a tree. Clearly she understood farm life well enough to know that it needed to be out of the way before all those trampling hooves came out. The family greeted the Ilus and were about to lead them in to breakfast when Pa called them all back. He had an idea for a language lesson.

"Bull," he said, pointing out Mister Trouble. "Cow." He petted Hortense. "Bull calf." Hortense's son Little Trouble. "Cow." Soupy Nye. "Heifer calf." Soupy Nye's daughter Breckenridge. The kids joined in, pointing out the sheep, the horses and the mule by their age and sex.

About that time, a half-dozen more curious neighbors wandered in. Seeing what was going on, they began to join in, too, pointing at anything and shouting the word for it. "Tree. Trunk. Limb. Twig. Leaf." "Shirt. Pants. Boots. Socks." "Grass, daisy, um, Daddy, what's this one?" Seeing that his original plan, to teach Ilu Vorn the words "male" and "female" so he could explain the basic idea of feminine modesty, was derailed, Pa called a halt and ordered everybody in to breakfast. None of the neighbors stayed for the meal.

Then they went inside and finished the lesson during breakfast. Ma said nothing as she served up bacon, corned beef hash, scrambled eggs, oatmeal and coffee. But then, as they got up to leave, she stopped them.

"Man," she said as she touched her husband's shoulder. "Boy, boy, boy," she indicated her sons. "They are male. They wear pants." She pulled at the cloth of Donnie's pant leg. "Woman." She pointed to herself. "Girl, girl. We are female. We wear dresses." She shook her skirt. "Ilu Vorn, you are female. You should wear a dress. Come on in here."

"Ilu Keo are female," said the fish. "Ilu Keo should wear a dress?" The bucket in the high chair suddenly absorbed Keo and became round, then not so perfectly round anymore. It flexed abruptly and bounced right out of the high chair and over the back to land on the floor. The children reacted with wild giggles and followed when it rolled into the parlor after Ma and Vorn.

From the chest next to the sewing machine, Ma pulled out a dress handed down from a cousin, waiting to be cut down to fit Bella. When she stood up, Ilu Vorn was ignoring her and gazing with fascination at the sewing machine. The blue woman moved the dust on it with a finger, then turned the wheel. The needle sank down and then stopped with a clunk. She flinched, not needing to be told that this was not what it was supposed to do. Meeting Ma's gaze, she pointed out three screws visible in the surface of the little machine. Then, with an expectant look, she mimed turning a screwdriver.

"Do you want her working on that?" asked Pa, who had come in after them.

"She looks like she knows what she's doing. Sure. Show her where the tools are."

When Pa saw that all the kids were following him and Vorn out to the tool shed, he ordered them all to get to work. After they scattered, Keo became visible, rolling along the path behind them. The globe was pretty slow on open ground. It didn't catch up until they reached the shed door. Both strangers looked very happy to be among tools and chatted in their own lingo while Vorn gathered up what she needed.

Back in the parlor, Vorn set Keo in an easy chair with a good view of the room. Then, in the time it took Ma and Tillie to clean up from breakfast, refill the wood box and start lunch, their blue guest took the sewing machine completely apart on the parlor floor, left it that way while doing something in the tool shed for fifteen minutes, returned and reassembled it. When she was done, it worked like new.

Then she refused to try on the dress. Ma thought at first that it was just that Keo needed to get back in the pond, but after dropping her off there, the blue woman went straight into the burned patch of woods.

-0-0-0-

"What's this?" Andy didn't really expect Ilu Vorn to answer, or even understand the question. He was looking at the patch of ground next to the tool shed where she had made a lean-to out of sheets of blackened metal salvaged from the wreck. Under it were a whole range of equally sooty things that he guessed were also salvaged. Her coverall looked pretty smudged up, too, but the thing she was cleaning with oil and a small brush was coming out shiny. She put down the brush.

"Keo walking machine," she said, pointing out the biggest pile. Andy guessed that the fish would ride in something like a wheelchair, but couldn't see any wheels. "Air light call." She indicated a small box. "Tools." There were others, but she didn't name them, just swept her gaze over them and said "Don't know words."

All at once, what he was looking at became clear. "Those are legs," he said. "And that's a hand."

"Yeah."

He was impressed that she had already learned that much English. Suddenly he had an idea. He went upstairs and brought down his chemistry textbook. He showed it to her, open to the Periodic Table of the Elements. The book, four years old, didn't include the new discoveries by Ramsay and the Curies, so he had drawn them in. When she saw it, her face lit up. She pointed to Oxygen with one finger and Hydrogen with two fingers of the other hand.

"Water," she said.

"Yeah."

"Tell me words."

-0-0-0-

A few more gawkers, all but one of them children, came at lunchtime. The Ilus were able to introduce themselves and, haltingly, with help from the Scotts, tell their own story of the crash. Their listeners were surprised to hear that Ilu Keo was the pilot.

"How did you fly it? You don't have any arms."

Keo did the jumping-out-of-the-high-chair trick again. Then she held perfectly still for a moment, then rolled over to the little boy who had asked the question. "See? This machine is like my legs. Where I want to go, it go. In the dirigible I have machine like my arms."

"Oh. Did it burn up?"

Keo looked at Vorn.

"I found some..." She picked up her slice of bread, then tore it into two pieces. There was a discussion while she got it clear that "pieces" was what she meant.

"Can you fix them?"

"I can try."

"Where are you from, Vorn?"

The answer was a bit of gibberish that sounded more like indigestion than like the name of a place.

"Is it east, west, north or south? Can you point to it?" The speaker, who was seven, demonstrated, pointing all over the room.

Vorn thought a moment, then pointed downward at a southeasterly angle.

"Hell?"

Andy spoke up. "No, I think she means it's so far away that it's around the curve of the Earth," even though he didn't really think that at all. She was pointing at about where Sagittarius would be, eight or ten hours away where it was already night. "In that direction, it might be a Caribbean island or South America."

"Where were you going?" The one adult in the group, the mother of three of the five children, asked that.

Andy had showed Vorn a map, so she knew the answer. "Mackinaw City."

"What for?"

"To marry Vichna ir Wedrei." She got a look of tenderness as she said the name. Andy hid his surprise. He'd been figuring that the Ilus were explorers.

"Does he live there?"

"No, we go there because, look down, flying, not like another place."

"You were both flying and you picked Mackinaw City because it's easy to find from the air."

More discussion, to make sure that this was what she meant.

"So, Vorn, you couldn't get married at home?"

"No. My family, ir Wedrei family, say no. Very..." She broke off with an exaggerated frown.

"Angry," said Bella, and "Mad," said Pa, simultaneously. More discussion.

"Why?" one of the visiting children asked. "Why didn't they want you to get married?"

Vorn pulled a little flat thing like a white coin out of the collar of her coverall and put it in the center of the table. She spoke a little gibberish and suddenly there were four small blue figures standing there, with four tiny fish hovering around them, all perfectly still. They were wearing what appeared to be white long johns with green markings. There was general consternation in the room. One of the children reached out to touch the figures and found his hand passing right through them. "This is like a rainbow," Vorn explained. "Made of light." She pointed to each in turn. "My father, Keo father, my mother, Keo mother, me, Keo, my brother, Keo brother." Then she spoke a few more words of gibberish and they vanished, replaced by a single figure of a man, not blue, but a white man with short brown hair and a beard that made a long narrow line from in front of his ears down to his very sharp chin. He was broad-shouldered and muscular, dressed in a brown coverall with lines of a gold color along the seams. Vorn smiled again, seeing him.

"So... Your family doesn't like him because he's not blue? And his family doesn't like you because you're not white?"

"Yeah. And ir Wedrei father... like the governor." The governor's name had been on the map of Michigan that Andy had showed her, so she had asked about it and he had explained. "He says 'Don't marry them!' and no people marry Vichna and me. We go here so no people know he says."

"It's not a hard walk down to the port," the visiting woman said. "And then you can probably find a boat to take you to Mackinaw City." This took some explaining before Vorn understood it.

"No, he look my dirigible. Not look me in boat. I find my radio. I fix it. I radio to him. He come."

"What's a radio?" asked Donnie. Radio was one of the new technologies Andy had seen and heard, and learned the principles by which it worked, at college, and the other adults knew what it was, but the younger children hadn't heard of it. By the time Andy finished explaining, lunch was over and it was time for everyone to get back to work.


	4. Chapter 4

By Saturday dinner, Vorn had found the pieces of the radio, but some of them were too damaged to use. After the meal, along with the other female members of the household, she bathed in the tin bath in front of the wood stove (the kitchen temporarily forbidden to male members of the household). Then, while the kitchen was male-only territory for Pa and the boys to take their weekly baths, she finally stood in the parlor and allowed Ma to fit the dress for her. Spare petticoats, stockings and boots were found and a bonnet was made on the sewing machine. On Sunday morning, she put it all on again, picked up Keo and climbed aboard the family wagon for the ride to church.

Pa tried to talk to their two guests about it beforehand. He wanted to make sure they knew what church was and determine whether they were Christians. The strangers were clear on the idea of worshiping the Creator. Keo, when she finally understood, said "All people do that! All not-stupid people." The idea that the Creator had a Son, on the other hand, seemed to confuse them. It was a relief to all of them when Pa finally gave up and told them that the Reverend Williams would explain it. Andy figured that the Ilus' people had a religion of their own and suspected that their confusion was a polite cover for their disagreement with what Pa was saying. In any case, he figured that Ma's explanation of polite church behavior would be more useful.

Sunday morning services were the only time the whole community gathered in one place. Pa and Ma knew that curiosity would run high, so they brought the family in plenty early, visiting the other two churches in the village (Catholic and Lutheran) for brief stops before going on to the Methodist church where they were members. At each stop, people gathered around, wanting to touch Vorn's blue skin and Keo's globe, asking questions (some of them downright silly, in Andy's opinion) and wanting to tell them things (mostly even sillier). It was a relief to him when Mrs. Williams, at the Methodist piano, struck up the processional hymn that signaled the start of the service.

The Ilus sat, stood and bowed their heads when the rest of the congregation did, but they didn't join in any of the praying aloud or singing. When the collection plate came around, Vorn put in a coil of silver wire about the size of a dime, salvaged from the dirigible. When the service ended, the Reverend Williams asked them into his office and Pa breathed a sigh of relief that the faith would be explained to them properly.

Less than five minutes later, Vorn, with Keo in her arms, burst out of the office, dashed through the crowd with an expression of distress on her face, climbed onto the Scotts' wagon and sat on the back bench, her back rigid with emotion.

"He says Keo has no soul!" she burst out when asked what was wrong. Keo pouted and refused to speak. All the people around them heard, and some of them began to argue with each other. Pa decided it was time to leave. Right now.

As the wagon got rolling, Vorn actually started to cry. Ma and the girls tried to soothe her, telling her that Reverend Williams just didn't know Keo that well, didn't understand that she was as much of a person as any of us, and would change his mind when he knew her better (Andy, knowing Williams, doubted this) until suddenly Keo rolled off Vorn's lap, across Bella's and Tillie's laps, and right out of the wagon onto the ground, where she landed and rolled back along the road toward the building they had just passed. By the time the wagon got stopped and everyone got out, she was inside it.

It was the smithy, its whole front open to the street because of the hot weather. Vorn gazed in with delight. "I can fix all the machine!" she exclaimed. "Who work here?" Donnie was sent to fetch Jacob Muller, the smith, who was Ma's cousin. He had gray in his beard and a German accent. When he arrived, there was a long discussion. She wanted several things, alloys of copper drawn into wire, particular shapes of steel with certain characteristics, and lots of soldering and welding. As he listened, Andy began to feel an unexpected emotion: jealousy. He realized that he had come to value being the only person hereabouts that really understood the Ilus, that could really help them. He was kind of relieved, and kind of ashamed of his relief, when Cousin Jacob said that he couldn't help them, that they really needed a jeweler or a watchmaker, not a country blacksmith. The Scotts explained what "jeweler" and "watchmaker" were.

"I can do watchmaker work," said Vorn. "I need tools." She gestured toward the furnace and the anvil.

"What?" asked the smith. "How would a girl learn that kind of thing?"

"My father teached me. He made lots of machines and always he teached me and my brother."

"She did fix the sewing machine," Ma pointed out.

"If I can work your tools two, no, three hours, I can fix my radio and Keo walking machine. Please, Mister Jacob Muller. I can pay. I have silver." Vorn pulled from her pocket more silver wire.

Jacob took a moment to digest this. "Well, the thing is, I'm pretty busy here right now. It would be a month or two before I'd be able to let you have the forge, and that's if nobody has any sudden breakdowns."

Andy chimed in. "But you have to sleep sometime. The forge doesn't. She could work at night."

"But who would bring her up here at such an hour?"

"I would. Besides, she probably could use my help with the heavy lifting."

-0-0-0-0-

Vorn resumed the coverall on Monday morning. She spent the day cleaning everything she was planning to take to the blacksmith's and loading it all into the wagon. After dinner, the mule was harnessed up and Ma gave Andy, Vorn and Keo a well-filled picnic basket and a quart jar of coffee. Andy had spent the day hoeing, nothing strenuous by his standards, so he didn't think he'd need the coffee, but he brought it along just in case. Along with his journal, in case he learned something useful.

The drive to the smithy was uneventful and the set-up was quick. She really knew what she was doing. At first, all he did was watch and load fuel, but then she explained, with many gestures, that she wanted to set up a platform hanging by chains from a pulley, holding the knife-grinding wheel on ball bearings so that it would spin freely, with a sack of bullet lead on top for weight and one of the little drill bits she'd recovered from the wreck sticking down through a hole in the platform, spun by the wheel. What it was going to drill was a slab of iron an inch thick, to make a die to draw the very fine wire she needed.

"This drill bit can drill through iron?" he asked incredulously.

"Yeah."

"What's it made of?"

"Wolfram and carbon."

"How?"

"Get wolfram ore, charcoal powder for carbon, potassium for reaction..." Step by step, she explained a process that rang a faint bell in his memory, something he'd read about the semester before last. Some French scientist had tried to make artificial diamonds about ten years back and had gotten this stuff, tungsten carbide, as a byproduct. It was considered useless at the time, because it was too hard to be worked into anything useful, but here it was in a useful shape, so he asked.

"How do you shape it?"

"Cast when it one thousand five hundred degrees hot, then sand with diamond sand."

"Huh. Hey, could we take a break? I want to write this down."

-0-0-0-0-

The two projects, the radio and Keo's walking machine, went on in alternation because sometimes things had to be allowed to cool gradually. Consequently they were both done at more or less the same time. The walking machine, which had a fire-stained human-shaped torso with skeletal steel arms and legs, but no head, was closed up for the final time and immediately jerked to life. It picked up Keo in her globe and set that globe where a human head would be. While the fish put her restored prosthetic through a full range of motion of all its joints, Vorn turned on the radio, adjusted a dial, and through the hiss of static came a baritone voice speaking in what Andy recognized as the Ilus' language, repeating the same two phrases over and over.

"Vichna!" She pushed a couple of buttons. It went silent. She spoke into the little gray dot that she said was the microphone, though it looked nothing like the one microphone he'd seen at school, a bulbous thing that would fill a beer mug. When she turned the radio back to Receive, the voice said "Vorn!" and laughed for joy.

The radio conversation lasted only a few minutes. Then the three shut down the forge, cleaned up, left a handful of silver wire on the anvil, and re-harnessed the mule. Keo participated eagerly in the clean-up and insisted on walking next to the wagon instead of riding. She was delighted to be walking again, and to have hands. Andy asked more about the work he'd participated in, and more about the wolfram-casting process, absorbing all he could about the unfamiliar technology. After they got home, after Keo had returned to the pond and Vorn set up the tent and climbed into it for what they expected would be the last time, he sat by himself at the kitchen table with a candle, bent over his notebook, knowing that what he was writing would change his destiny and possibly that of the world.

-0-0-0-0-

Vichna's dirigible arrived just at dawn, sinking down over the pond, blocking out the lightening sky. It was black, almost impossible to see, and it held as still as Vorn's made-of-light figures, unaffected by the light breeze. As everyone on the farm gathered around, the Scotts gawking, Vorn and Keo waving excitedly, a door opened in the bottom of it. There was light inside, and the form of a man diving out. In midair, he changed direction, came at Vorn (now back in her silver coverall) and snatched her up for a kiss. None of them expected him to be so big; he was half a head taller than Pa and Andy. He held Vorn, her feet dangling, as if she weighed nothing.

"Vichna can fly," Tilly said with wonder.

"All his people can fly," said Keo. "But not angels. Some of them very not angels."

After the kiss broke off, the couple turned to the Scotts, smiling broadly.

"We have so many thanks for you," Vorn said. "Maybe we can pay for?"

Ma and Pa denied firmly that the visitors owed them anything.

"But you, Andy, you help so much. I think if you don't, Vichna maybe couldn't find me so soon. How can we pay you?"

"You already have," Andy replied, then realized that he hadn't told any of the family what he'd realized the night before. "You showed me how to do things, useful things, that nobody knows how to do, nobody in America, maybe nobody else in the world. As soon as I work out the practical details, I'm going to start a company and then we'll be rich. It's me that owes you."

Keo spoke up. "Then take this." She was holding out the radio in her mechanical hands. "It only needs a tiny little amount of power, the power from the tiny shaking of a floor where people walk. With that power it will send a radio signal saying 'Here are people who help our people. Here is a safe place.' Any people from our families, have to fly away, can come here."

-0-0-0-0-

"You see how naive they were," Lewis said to Robert over lunch. "This was before any of the horrific experiences with extraterrestrials that we had in the twentieth century. It's not something we can do today."

"So the radio that Keo gave Andrew is in the mansion." The idea that it had been there his whole life, broadcasting its little signal without anyone's knowledge, disturbed him.

"Yes. When Andrew built the place - he'd have been about your age - he installed it in the underfloor, right where the family puts up the Christmas tree every year. How it got forgotten over the generations, I'm not sure. I only know about it because I've read those journals, beginning to end, something that you should think about. Now, you've got some real luck here in that the baby, I'm assuming he's an ir Wedrei, can pass. Nobody needs to know where he really came from. People will just assume that his biological parents gave him up for adoption because they couldn't handle a child with his level of powers.

"I did some ballistic calculations and I tapped some security cams and I found out where that other spacecraft went. Here's the simulation." He held out his phone. It displayed a map of the city with a line drawn in, one end at the mansion's front gates, the other...

"The supermax," Robert murmured, and cursed in dismay. "That's the end of it, then."

"Not necessarily. I have a contact in the Santangelo organization." The old man generally kept his underworld connections quiet, but he kept them up. "He's promised to get in touch with someone inside, to find out what was in that other spacecraft without getting any official attention."

"Why? Why is it important at all? And why is it important to avoid official attention? I mean, it's not like this thing is going to add to our tax burden."

"Didn't you get it when you read the journal? These people, the Ilus and the ir Wedreis, are the ace up the family's sleeve. We are where we are because we know about these people and their technology before anybody else does. And I don't intend to let that change."

-0-0-0-

Dinner time. He'd been assembling an inventory of all the children in the city with unusual abilities. There were more than he'd thought. By then, his father had gotten back to him about what had landed in the prison: a blue infant and a little fish. His idea was that the family could keep an eye on them, while not being obvious about it, by setting up some kind of program or school that would serve this population. But when Sally called, he set it aside. For the foreseeable future, pretending to listen was out. He needed to really pay attention.

"Ah, darling. What did the doctor say?" The nearest pediatrician specializing in superpowered infants was in Chicago. While he'd been reading Andrew's journal, she'd gone there to have young Wayne examined.

"She said she'd never seen a baby with this level of gifts. They did a DNA analysis and found that he has a triple helix, and that it gives him what she called virtual indestructibility..."

At that point, Robert extracted his attention for just a moment to reflect that an indestructible baby was probably the only kind Sally could be trusted with. And so maybe things had worked out for the best after all.


End file.
